A Place so Foreign | Page 7

their heads shaved for lice. They pointed at me and laughed. I scooped up a flat stone from the shore and threw it at the head of the one who'd pulled me under, as hard as I could.
Lucky for him -- and me! -- I was too angry to aim properly, and the stone hit him in the shoulder, knocking him backwards. He shouted at me -- it was like a roar of a wild animal -- and the four brothers charged.
Oly appeared at my side. "Run!" he shouted.
I was too angry. I balled my fists and stood my ground. The first one shot out of the water towards me, and punched me so hard in the guts, I saw stars. I fell to the ground, gasping. I looked up at a forest of strong, bare legs, and knew they'd surrounded me.
"It's the Sheriff!" Oly shouted. The legs disappeared. I struggled to my knees.
Oly collapsed to the ground beside me, laughing. "Did you see the way they ran? The Sheriff never comes down to the river!"
"Thanks," I said, around gasps, and started to get dressed.
"Any time," he said. "Now, let's do some swimming."
"No, I gotta go home and help Mama," I lied. I didn't feel like going skinny dipping anymore -- maybe never again.
Oly gave me a queer look. "OK. See you."
#
I went straight home, pelting down the road as fast as I could, not even looking where I was going. I let the door slam behind me and took the stairs two at a time up to the attic ladder, then bolted the trap-door shut behind me and sat in the dark, with my knees in my chest.
Down below, Mama let out a half-hearted, "James? Is that you?" like she always did since I came back home. I ignored her, like always, and she stopped worrying about it, like always.
Pa's last trip had been to the Dalai Lama's court in 1975. The man from the embassy said that he was going to talk with the monks about a "white-paper that the two embassies were jointly presenting on the effect of mimetic ambassadorships on the reincarnated soul." It was all nonsense to me. He'd never arrived. The teleporter said that it had put him down gentle as you like on the floor of the Lama's floating castle over the Caspian Sea, but the monks never saw him.
And that was that.
It had been a month since our return. I'd ventured out into town and looked up my chums, and found them so full of gossip that didn't mean anything to me; so absorbed with games that seemed childish to me; so strange, that I'd retreated home. I'd prowled around our house like a burglar at first, and when I came back to the attic, all the numbness that had enveloped me since the man from the State Department had teleported into our apt melted away and I started bawling.
The attic had always been Pa's domain. He'd come up here with whatever crackpot invention he'd ordered this month out of a catalog or one of the expensive, foreign journals he subscribed to, and tinker and swear and hit his thumbnail and tear his pants on a stray dingus and smoke his cheroots and have a heck of a time.
The muffled tread of his feet and the distant cursing while I sat in the parlour downstairs had been the homiest sound I knew. Mama and I would lock eyes every time a particularly forceful round of hollers shook down, and Mama would get a little smile and her eyes would crinkle, and I felt like we were sharing a secret.
Now, the attic was my private domain: there was the elixir shelf, full of patent medicines, hair-tonics, and soothing syrups. There was the bookcase full of wild theories and fantastic adventure stories. There were the crates full of dangerous, coal-fired machines -- an automatic clothes-washing-machine, a cherry-pitter, and other devices whose nature I couldn't even guess at. None of them had ever worked, but I liked to run my hands over them, feel the smooth steel of their parts, disassemble and reassemble them. Back in 75, I'd once tried to take the robutler apart, just to get a look at how it was all put together, but it was a lost cause -- I couldn't even figure out how to get the cover off.
I walked through the cool dark, the only light coming from the grimy attic window, and fondled each piece. I picked up an oilcan and started oiling the joints and bearings and axles of each machine in turn. Pa would have wanted to know that everything was in good working order.
#
"I think you should be going to school, James," Mama said, at breakfast. I'd already done my morning chores, bringing in